1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information recognition device and information recognition method wherein the content of an utterance is recognized using the myo-electrical signals of the speaker's muscles when speaking.
2. Related Background Art
Information recognition devices are previously known whereby the content of an utterance is recognized using the myo-electrical signal generated by movement etc of perioral muscles of the person performing the speaking action, independently of sound. In this way, information recognition from the movement of the mouth or tongue etc can be achieved without the speaker generating sound. This is very useful in noisy environments or in places where silence is required.
Methods of information recognition from myo-electrical signals in such an information recognition device include for example: as disclosed in Noboru Sugie et al., “A speech employing a speech synthesizer vowel discrimination from perioral muscles activities and vowel production”, IEEE transactions on Biomedical Engineering, vol. 32, No. 7, 1985, pp 485-490, a method of information recognition in which the five vowels (a, i, u, e, o) are discriminated by passing a myo-electrical signal through a bandpass filter and counting the number of crossings of a threshold value; as disclosed in Laid-open Japanese Patent Publication Number H. 7-181888, a method of detection of not just vowels but also consonants from a speaker by using an neural network to process a power spectrum obtained by FFT processing of the myo-electrical signals of perioral muscles; or as disclosed in Laid-open Japanese Patent Publication Number H. 6-12483, a method of converting the amplitude of a myo-electrical signal into binary form using a threshold value and processing this using a neural network.